All Linux OS developers can now implement Secure Boot in their distros!

Feb 9, 2013 05:47 GMT  ·  By

The Linux Foundation proudly announced a few hours ago, February 8, that they have officially unleashed the highly anticipated UEFI secure boot system for all Linux distributions, courtesy of the Microsoft Corporation.

James Bottomley, the Director of The Linux Foundation was happy to announce on his blog the immediate availability for download of the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system.

“This was actually released to us by Microsoft on Wednesday 6 February, but with travel, conferences and meetings I didn’t really get time to validate it all until today.” James Bottomley said on the blog announcement.

We’ve talked about the UEFI Secure Boot System back in December 2012, when Matthew Garrett, an ex-power management and mobile Linux developer at Red Hat, was proud to announce that a usable release of the Secure Boot bootloader is ready to be implemented in any Linux operating system.

The UEFI secure boot system is a piece of software designed to be implemented by independent Linux distribution developers in their Linux OSes, in order easily access a signed boot shim. More details about shim, the Secure Boot Bootloader, can be found here.

The UEFI secure boot system is comprised of two files, the PreLoader.efi and HashTool.efi, which can be downloaded right now from here. James Bottomley also created a Gummiboot powered bootable mini-USB image with an EFI shell on it, where the Linux kernel should be. It can be downloaded from the above link as well.

“Let me know how this goes because I’m very interested to gather feedback about what works and what doesn’t work. In particular, there’s a worry that the security protocol override might not work on some platforms, so I particularly want to know if it doesn’t work for you.” said James Bottomley at the end of the announcement.